Founder of Shame School and author of You Are Not Your Mother: Releasing Generational Trauma & Shame and Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters: A Guide for Separation, Liberation & Inspiration
this I believe
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Being intentional with the way you relate to yourself re-forms your understanding how you deserve to be treated. You can influence how you feel about who you are without controlling who you are. Connection is more powerful than control. It takes more creativity and time, but it is also deeper and lasts much longer. What would connection to (versus control of) yourself look like? Are you willing to be creative and take the time to connect to yourself? You do not need to be perfect. But you can be compassionately accountable to yourself and to your healing. The most protective thing you can do for yourself is develop a relationship where you trust yourself to be supportive of yourself rather than shaming or mean. When you punish yourself and inflict intentional pain on yourself, you abandon yourself...you teach yourself not to trust yourself. The way you talk about yourself, to yourself, and the way you interpret your actions, will become an identity that influences the way you will act in the future. Much, much love, Karen
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Karen C.L. Anderson
Founder of Shame School and author of You Are Not Your Mother: Releasing Generational Trauma & Shame and Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters: A Guide for Separation, Liberation & Inspiration
"Things that are alive want to flourish." ~ Lindsay Gibson in this NYT interview Compassion For Your Parents Can Be A Trap Shame does NOT want us to flourish. At best, it blunts and dims us, keeping us small. At worst, it annihilates us. It destroys our relationship with our actual experiences, feelings, and true selves. Not because we deserve it, although when internalized it feels that way...as if it were etched in stone and written in the stars. Permanent. At worst, there were times when I...
[listen to me read this over on Substack] “The revolution will NOT be psychologized.The revolution will be alchemized.The revolution will be ancestoralized.The revolution will be an offering.The revolution will be a flood of grace.The revolution will be ritualized.The revolution will be poeticized.” — From The Emerald podcast episode “The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized” by Joshua Michael Schrei When we are born, we have both the fire of the opal and the watery coolness of oceans within...
Question from a reader: My mother has been a hurtful presence in my life for as long as I can remember. I am going to my home country soon and need to decide if I will visit her. If she was a reasonable distance from where I will be, I would go, but she is in a city that is a day-trip each way by train or driving. At least seven hours each way. I’m trying to decide if a 45-minute visit (which is probably all she'd want) is worth the 14+ hours of travel, when we have other family and friends...